the hibbett lab

at Clark University

Lab News

2011

September

Welcome to Otto Miettinen, who is visiting for one month from the Botanical Institute of the University of Helsinki. Otto is a participant in the PolyPEET project, and is working on Skeletocutis and related Polyporales.

It was a busy summer, particularly in late July when several of us travelled to Fairbanks for an excellent MSA meeting, hosted by Lee Taylor and Gary Laursen. Dimitris, Manfred and Alfredo all made presentations, and David facilitated a “roundtable” discussion on environmental species (those discovered through sequence data).

Just before the start of the school year, David participated in the very interesting NSF-sponsored AVATOL “Ideas Lab” in Lake Placid. This was a bit like a cross between Survivor and summer camp for phylogeneticists. Among other things, we drew cartoons of each other and played with modeling clay.

May

We have finally launched a PolyPEET website. Please check it out and let us know your thoughts.

Congratulations to Dylan Glotzer (to the right), who has completed an honors thesis titled “Species accumulation with non-parameteric models and year-based complementarity analysis using a large fungal DNA database”. Dylan graduated summa cum laude and will continue with us through the Accelerated Degree Program (aka the 5th year Masters).

Congratulations also to Anders Ohman, who successfully defended his Masters thesis on fungal bioinformatics. Anders has made valuable contributions to our data mining and analysis projects, and is a coauthor on two recent publications:

Yet more congratulations to Darcy Young, who graduated with a BA and is continuing in our lab through the 5th year Masters program. Darcy will work with Rachael Martin on a project on mycoremediation of oil pollution, based at the Fisherville Mill in South Grafton, Massachusetts. Darcy’s part of the project focuses on transcriptomics using selected basidiomycetes for which whole genomes are available, while Rachael will screen diverse fungi for their ability to degrade oil. Darcy and Rachael’s work is supported by a grant from the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise.

March

David and Brian Dempsey (who is a teacher at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School) gave a presentation at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Association of Biology Teachers at Framingham State College. The presentation described a classroom exercise on fungal molecular ecology.

David’s mother, Akiko Hibbett, has just published a book, From Okinawa to the Americas, which describes the life and travels of Hana Yamagawa, David’s grandmother. (This may not qualify as “lab news” but we want to announce it here anyway.)

Members of the Hibbett lab participated in a foray at the Trustees of Reservations Cormier Woods property in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. It was a beautiful day and about 60 people showed up, including friends from the Boston Mycological Club

Crowd at Cormier Woods

Left from right: Laetiporus, Ben & Sparassis, George Davis

September

Beginning this month, we have a new active grant on taxonomy of Boletineae from Queensland, Australia, which is funded by the NSF Systematic Biology and Biodiversity Inventories program. This project is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Roy Halling of the New York Botanical Garden. PhD student Mitchell Nuhn is being supported on this award.

David participated in the 12th International Conference on Culture Collections on beautiful Santa Catarina Island in Brazil, and then attended the first annual Rick Foray , which was hosted by Maria Alice Neves (who spent time in our lab working on Phylloporus and is now a faculty member at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianópolis). The Rick Foray drew students and colleagues from three continents . To keep all these people connected, Maria Alice and her husband Nathan Smith are running a new blog/networking site called The Fungal Forum

Elisabet Sjökvist joined our lab as a visiting graduate student, with support from the PolyPEET project, and will stay into December. Elisabet is a student of Karl-Henrik Larsson at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and is studying phylogenetics of polypore, corticioid fungi, and stipitate-steroid fungi

In September we received the exciting news that our proposal to the Joint Genome Institute Community Sequencing Program for a suite of thirty saprotrophic Agaricomycotina was approved. Genomes of the selected taxa will allow us to reconstruct the backbone of the Agaricomycotina phylogeny and elucidate the evolution of the decay apparatus. We are collaborating with multiple colleagues on this project, including Dan Cullen from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin This is part of a broad initiative in fungal genomics by the JGI, which also includes analyses of suites of mycorrhizal fungi, yeasts, and taxonomically problematical chytrids and zygomycetes

Jaya Seelan joined our lab as a new PhD student. Jaya is employed as a Tutor at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation of the Universiti Malaysia Sabah , which is supporting his studies at Clark.

RET* and RAHSS** supplements to our NSF PolyPEET grant are allowing us to host Loreen Meyer, who is a teacher from King Philip Regional High School, and Claudia Osorio and David Marcano, who are high school students from the University Park Campus School for a summer research experience. Loreen, Claudia and David are working with Alfredo on molecular systematics of polypores. Loreen discussed the connection between her summer research and academic year teaching in an article in the Sun Chronicle. *Research Experiences for Teachers
**Research Experiences for High School Students.

May

Dr. Beatriz Ortiz-Santana (at the picture at right) arrived and will be with us until June. Beatriz is the director of the herbarium of the USDA Forest Products Lab During her visit, we will coordinate research under the PolyPEET grant. As a participant in the polyPEET project, she will be working with Dan Linder and Karen Nakasone on the “Antrodia clade”, a taxonomically difficult group of brown-rot polypores. She also has interests in boletes and agarics.

Congratulations to Ingo Morgenstern, who successfully defended his PhD on class II fungal peroxidase diversity and evolution. We had a party at which we marveled at an amazing cake produced by Jenni Mattingly.
Ingo is headed off to a post-doc with Adrian Tsang at Concordia University

2009

October

2009 Northeast Mycological Foray on Cape Cod.Among other fun activities,we played a fungal phylogeny game, in which contestants arranged their collections on the tips of a giant cladogram and then traced the shortest path connecting their taxa. Points are accumulated whenever a new node is traversed for the first time.The most phylogenetically diverse suite of taxa wins.

September

Welcome to Mitchell Nuhn, who has joined the lab as a new PhD student. Previously, Mitchell worked with Dr. Jose Herera at Truman State University on fungal endophytes of grasses.

David gave a talk at the Society for General Microbiology, Darwin’s Tree of Life Symposium at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland